Talmon and Peleg's Israeli Cinema - Journal for the Study of ...

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\\jciprod01\productn\J\JSA\4-1\JSA111.txt unknown Seq: 2 13-JUN-12 11:20 1102 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM[ VOL. 4:1101 tions, expressed in Ben Gurion’s famous disdain for the medium, reminding listeners that Moses did well without ever going to the movies. On the other hand, the principle that instigated Herzl’s flop continued to excite Zionist activists, who believed that a “realist” portrayal of Jewish life in Palestine would help facilitate the formation of the national community. Influenced by Herzl’s vision and by popular Zionist tropes, Jewish European filmmakers of the early 1910s laid the foundations—and outlined the standard imagery—of Zionist and early Israeli cinema. The aesthetic and ideological preferences of directors and spectators have considerably changed over the years. Yet, the early filmmakers’ aspiration to document, define, and transform collective identities has informed a century-long effort to envision the Israeli self-image on the screen. Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg’s Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion is an intriguing inquiry into this ambition to negotiate self-perceptions in Zionist and Israeli films. With the premise that film provides a glance into the “collective unconscious” (ix), it introduces a diverse collection of studies that analyze the varying expression of Israeli identities from the early years of the British Mandate to the early 2000s. As an introduction to Israeli visual culture and its relationships with major trends in Israeli society, this volume is a significant addition to the scholarship in this field. Together with a few other recent publications, it reflects both the growing international interest in the intricacies of Israeli identity politics and the current prevalent recognition of Israeli cinema manifested inter alia in the multiple Oscar nominations, prestigious prizes, and presentations at international festivals during the last decades. 2 According to the authors of this volume, Israeli and Zionist films have generally conformed—through different methods and in different contexts—to a specific mood of the time of their production. Most articles in the book seem to embrace a distinct categorization of Israeli films that corresponds with certain “phases” in Israeli history. The initial phase, according to this approach, demonstrates commitment to the Zionist narrative, propaganda, and self-image. Beginning in Mandate Palestine, with filmmakers such as Yaacov Ben-Dov, Nathan Axelrod, and Helmar Lerski, this stage, with films such as Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955), continued into the early 1960s. In accordance with the culture of this first phase, these films displayed the new muscular, heroic Jew; adopted the Labor Zionist’s enthu- 2. Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010); and Raz Yosef, Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
\\jciprod01\productn\J\JSA\4-1\JSA111.txt unknown Seq: 3 13-JUN-12 11:20 2012] LIGHTS, CAMERA, IDENTITY 1103 siasm for manual work and collectivism; presented Zionism as the remedy for past traumas; and showed the “Other” as primitive and perilous. The second phase, which lasted into the first Intifada, shifted the emphasis from a deliberate effort to “consolidate and create an Israeli community” to a “normalized local cinematic idiom” (xii). While they still featured a mostly “masculine world” of Ashkenazi Jews, films also expressed willingness to challenge and deviate from the traditional conventions (manifested in the criticism of Israeli militarism, the focus on the individual rather than the collective, and the introduction of new heroes—war widows, Mizrahim, Holocaust survivors, and young, horny, selfish city-dwellers). The third phase, developing since the early 1990s, corresponds with the optimism generated by the Oslo Accord and with the desertion of melting-pot ideology in favor of Israeli multiculturalism. It featured the work of a new generation of filmmakers, who often celebrated their otherness—e.g., homosexuals, Orthodox Jews, new immigrants, Mizrahi Jews, and Arabs. These filmmakers, according to the reviewed articles, were not merely critical of old Zionist paradigms and current politics; they also expressed a “post-Zionist” approach (i.e., they were ready and eager to question the principles of the Zionist credo, and were sympathetic to its victims and outcasts). Finally, the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process added a sense of depression, helplessness, and sometimes apathy to the multiculturalism of the 1990s. The generalization about the historical development of the identity discourse in Israeli cinema has some notable advantages as a starting point for the discussion of Israeli films. Mainly, it reveals similarities and links between seemingly unrelated phenomena. Thus, for instance, the avantgarde aesthetics and fascination with decay and death among the young auteurs of the new sensibility á la Judd Ne’eman concurred with new visibility of Mizrahi Jews and urbanite bums in the early seventies (see Peleg and Yaron Shemer’s article). Both identified with the new readiness to challenge the existing image of the Israeli collectivity. Similarly, Anat Zanger shows how the biblical story of the Akedah is repeated in the contemporary phase of Israeli cinema in different films with the same woeful conclusion, which underscores contemporary awareness to “the complicated relations between Zionism and its concomitant ethos of binding and sacrifice” (235). This scheme, however, overlooks several complexities and nuances. This is most evident in the articles that consider the early years of Zionist and Israeli cinema, which allegedly demonstrate an “intensive and deliberate effort” to envisage the ethos of Labor Zionism. Ariel L. Feldstein’s informative article, for instance, has some noteworthy insights on the uniqueness of Zionist propaganda films; yet, he depicts Zionist filmmakers as a homogenous group of people with similar views and objectives. This
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